Weeknotes #37

Jeremy Keith

7th March 2014

The big news this week is that we have a new Clearlefty. Andy Thornton (yes, yet another Andy) is so new, we haven’t gotten around to adding him to the team page yet. And the poor blighter is being thrown in at the deep end, heads-down with Boxman and Batesy working on a somewhat secretive exploratory project that will come to fruition next week.

Mark, Jon and Andy P. have been continuing their work on an interactive prototype for the internal asset-management tool at NBC Universal. I find it fascinating to watch them work literally side-by-side. Rapid iteration is the order of the day: lots of quick’n’dirty JavaScript code to test interaction ideas.

Andy has also been making his predictions for the next hipster trend once burritos—the new falafal—have jumped the shark. It might be shark. He has also been playing Super Street Fighter 4. From the noises I can hear, Jon too is playing video games. He has a long way to go before he catches up with either Andy or Graham.

When he’s not playing Street Fighter, Graham is continuing his dabbles in the infernal world of making native phone apps with web technologies, meddling with forces beyond our ken. In a similar vein, Ben has been investigating Framer.js.

Richard has been continuing his work writing a design manual and content editors’ guide with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. We both popped up to see them in London last week; I was casting an eye over their front-end code. Lovely people.

On Wednesday, 68 Middle Street was also the venue for the Square Film workshop and yesterday evening we had a Clearleft film night. The theme was artificial intelligence and, apart from the obvious Kubrickian candidate, there were a few recent releases in the running. All this event activity means that Tessa has spent most of the week running up and down stairs.

Andy and Ant have been doing their fair share of train parkour up and down to London meeting with potential clients and chasing up interesting projects. One of the interesting projects that has materialised is some work with the European Commission, specifically capacity4dev.eu. Ant and Viv will be heading over for the kick-off meeting in Brussels next week. I predict moules and frites in their future.

Me, I’ve mostly had my brain occupied by future events. As well as preparing talks for upcoming speaking engagements, I’ve been whittling away at a Clearleft event that I’m hoping to unveil next week. Watch this space.

And speaking of Clearleft events, Kate was very excited when this week marked the point at which three-day tickets for UX London sold out. You can’t say we didn’t warn you. But don’t worry if you didn’t manage to grab a three-day pass: single-day tickets are still available …for now.

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